{"id":2549,"date":"2017-02-25T07:00:50","date_gmt":"2017-02-25T12:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=2549"},"modified":"2024-03-18T13:12:46","modified_gmt":"2024-03-18T17:12:46","slug":"losers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/losers\/","title":{"rendered":"Losers (Dave Van Ronk)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Losers (Dave Van Ronk)\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/QFXKPyLiuDM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Dave Van Ronk intended this to be the title song of the album we ended up calling <em>Going Back to Brooklyn <\/em>&#8212; he was proud of the song and thought as a title it would be suitably ironic, especially considering his economic situation at the time. However,\u00a0 his manager thought calling his <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-2551 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Going-Back-to-Brooklyn-e1685415601248.jpg?resize=218%2C218&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"218\" height=\"218\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Going-Back-to-Brooklyn-e1685415601248.jpg?w=270&amp;ssl=1 270w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Going-Back-to-Brooklyn-e1685415601248.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 218px) 100vw, 218px\" \/>first album of original songs &#8220;Losers&#8221; was asking for trouble, and then his wife Andrea did the beautiful stained glass of a red moon rising over the Brooklyn Bridge, and that was that. In any case, this song is a fine example of his lyrical gifts (as are &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/sunday-street\/\">Sunday Street<\/a>&#8221; &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/gaslight-rag\/\">Gaslight Rag<\/a>,&#8221; &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/another-time-place\/\">Another Time and Place<\/a>,&#8221; &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/blood-red-moon\/\">Blood Red Moon<\/a>&#8230;&#8221; I could go on, but you get the idea.)<\/p>\n<p>Dave wrote this around 1980, and I see from old setlists that I played it at the first gig on my first national tour. That was at the Mill in Iowa City, a nice bar run by a nice man named Keith Dempster, who booked me for two nights, not mentioning that it would be the first big football weekend of<img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-2552 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/The-Mill-from-Gregs-album.jpg?resize=296%2C171&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"296\" height=\"171\" \/> the season. It was a baptism of fire, my chance to prove what I could do in a noisy, rowdy bar, and I failed the test &#8212; though no harm was done, because no one was listening.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t have much more to say about this song, because it speaks for itself &#8212; except to note that Dave had a deep and broad love for the English language. How many songs use the word &#8220;whosis,&#8221; or the phrase &#8220;groan bin&#8221;? I&#8217;d never run across &#8220;groan bin&#8221; before, and was charmed when I looked it up in Google and the only reference was to a Donald Duck comic in which &#8220;Donald warns Huey, Dewey, and Louie that their lack of outdoor survival skills will lead to a \u2018trip to the groan bin\u2019.&#8221; As it happens, <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-2553 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Dave-Van-Ronk5.jpg?resize=300%2C285&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"285\" \/>Dave was an inveterate reader of Donald Duck comics, had a collection of vintage Disney books he sold for a pretty penny in the late 1970s, and bemoaned what he regarded as my inexplicable (and generally undeserved) good luck by calling me &#8220;Cousin Gladstone,&#8221; a reference to Donald&#8217;s ridiculously lucky cousin, Gladstone Gander. &#8220;HoJo,&#8221; for the young folks, is the Howard Johnson&#8217;s restaurant chain. And according to Eric Partridge&#8217;s dictionary of slang, &#8220;Sneaky Pete&#8221; was a term for cheap wine, in use among hoboes in the 1930s.<\/p>\n<p>I always thought &#8220;Losers&#8221; was one of Dave&#8217;s funniest songs, but given the current president&#8217;s proclivity for the word, and the state of the nation in his singularly incompetent hands, I am not only beginning to take it seriously, but proposing it as our new national anthem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dave Van Ronk intended this to be the title song of the album we ended up calling Going Back to Brooklyn &#8212; he was proud of the song and thought as a title it would be suitably ironic, especially considering his economic situation at the time. However,\u00a0 his manager thought calling his first album of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/losers\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Losers (Dave Van Ronk)<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Losers (Dave Van Ronk) - 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As I explained in an earlier post, his original title for that album was \"Losers,\"\u00a0 but\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Going-Back-to-Brooklyn.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3229,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/urge-for-going\/","url_meta":{"origin":2549,"position":1},"title":"Urge for Going (Joni Mitchell\/Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"November 18, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"The ultimate fall-into-winter song, by Joni Mitchell, arranged by Dave Van Ronk. I tend to be more optimistic about this season, so my standard autumn song is Bill Morrissey's \"My Baby and Me,\" but I always loved the way Dave did this -- plus, my Vancouver buddy Monte Jones had\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/van-ronk-polydor.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1824,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/bad-dream-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":2549,"position":2},"title":"Bad Dream Blues (Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 25, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Though Dave Van Ronk was not principally known as a songwriter, he wrote some damn good songs. But before he got into songwriting in more ambitious ways, he recorded a handful of blues songs for which he took author credit. He didn't consider these fully original compositions, since they had\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"blues project","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/blues-project-300x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1425,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/random-canyon\/","url_meta":{"origin":2549,"position":3},"title":"Random Canyon (Peter Stampfel\/Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 12, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Dave Van Ronk regularly finished sets with this surrealist cowboy song by the brilliant Peter Stampfel -- one more among the many debts I owe both of them.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/van-ronk-polydor.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":2919,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/a-mans-a-man\/","url_meta":{"origin":2549,"position":4},"title":"A Man&#8217;s a Man (Bertolt Brecht\/Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"July 8, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"The title song from Bertolt Brecht's early play Mann ist Mann, this was my professional recording debut, arranging and playing guitar for Dave Van Ronk. Dave was a great interpreter of Brecht's songs, and even appeared in an off-Broadway production of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Brecht-CD-cover-296x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1031,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/black-mountain-blues\/","url_meta":{"origin":2549,"position":5},"title":"Black Mountain Blues (Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"May 14, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I got this from Dave Van Ronk's first album -- once again, it was the kind of violent, bragging song that perfectly suited the tastes of a teenage boy who was getting into blues. Dave had learned it from Bessie Smith's recording, and had the bright idea of combining her\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"Scrapper_Blackwell and Bessie Smith","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/Scrapper_Blackwell-and-Bessie-Smith-197x300.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2549"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5116,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2549\/revisions\/5116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}